May 23rd, 2014 
AstroNerdBoy Some Fruits Basket Love (And some other boring stuff. ^_~)
Hey gang!
Well, I’ve got a special project for work that has taken up a ton of my time, including my weekend time. 🙁 But, it pays the bills, so I can’t complain too much. ^_~
Regardless, my plans to have finished watching a certain anime series I started episode blogging ages ago, but obviously never finished, has failed so far. *sigh* So much for my brilliant plans to not only make a huge dent in my manga piles (which I’ve done a fair amount of), but to knock out at least two backlogged anime series AND possibly do a “Back to the Vault” post, which I’ve not done in ages.
Anyway, whilst I am so busy, I thought I’d share a little Fruits Basket love, since I’m rereading the series (slowly) as my bedtime reading material.
*lol* The look on the face of Kyo (the orange cat).
Takaya-sensei’s character designs at this point weren’t that good to me. The characters all became generic and simplistic in their design, causing them to loose some personality. Shame, really.
I think Touru and the others have more personality in these older character designs, especially in the black-and-white drawings.
Despite my not liking the character design hit the series took after volume 8, I still rather enjoy the manga a great deal. It is a shame that it wasn’t license-rescued. As hot of a title as it was for TokyoPop, one would have thought that it would be a sure fire pickup, but I guess not. A mystery, as Haru would say. ^_~
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Fruits Basket is one of my favorite series, and every few years I like to go back and read it again.
As for the character design, I think it was around volume 8 that Takaya needed some surgery on her hand and that had a noticeable impact as you mentioned.
The anime was somewhat fun to watch, but like most anime that is made before the manga is completed there had to be some changes, and a few things don’t really get explored/explained until the last half of the manga volumes. The anime was done in 2001 but the series didn’t end until 2006.
Takaya and the director didn’t see eye to eye over a few details, (e.g. the importance the baseball cap) but the significance of those details weren’t revealed in the manga until about 2 or 3 years after the anime. I think it was these types of issues why she has refused any other anime adaptions of her works, which is too bad considering she’s had other good series as well that I think could have been made into some good anime, if they had waited until the manga series was completed.
But as with most anime, they are made more to draw attention and get people interested in buying the manga with only handful of manga series getting proper anime adaptation which doesn’t go off into left field. If a manga series is hugely popular then an anime may get a remake that is fairly close to the manga, or you get anime seasons separated by 2-3 years while they wait for enough content.
‘Splain’s me lots of mysteries. Thanks very much.
I also wrote stuff about this in 2007.
http://anime.astronerdboy.com/2007/01/why-no-fruits-basket-2.html
Interesting article and another reason why I wish I had found your site a few years earlier, but I was too busy with university graduate work at that time.
Thanks. And I know what you mean about being busy. I had a lot more free time back in 2007. 😛
Ditto. I probably reread it once a year though. 😛
Yeah, and that’s a shame. They just got worse as time went on, but no doubt, it was easier for Takaya-sensei to draw then.
Back in 2007, I wrote a bit about this very topic. ^_^
Anyway, it is a shame that a proper Fruits Basket anime wasn’t done. 🙁